What Happens Next: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Antonoff, and Kevin Coval Teach Me How to Slow Down

I'm standing on the corner of Madison and 23rd, trying to get myself back home soon. The night is warm, my stomach full of coffee and my lungs full of smoke. Home, for now, is a couch in Crown Heights. As it becomes 2:00 in the morning, I look down the endless street and wonder if I'll ever make it back. The longer I stay away, the less likely it feels.

When searching for home, it's easy to run out of places to look. After all, there are only so many lonesome street corners, empty diners, desolate Fugazi's. So when the highways and runways grow less inviting, these great minds find themselves in the beds of strangers, in East side basement bars and uptown sunrise stoops. But you, in your alleged greatness, soon discover that home doesn't exist there either. You come to find that the warm embrace of opium and motorcyclists always eventually disappears into the morning, into the skyscrapers, into the unyielding Hudson. And all you've done, really, is destroy yourself.

But maybe that destruction is exactly the point. Maybe one must decimate every notion of who they're expected to be, and exchange those ruins for who they really are. And maybe we must learn what everyone who's had to destroy themselves already knows: there is courage in the collapse. We may find we are not as smart or as stoic as we hoped ourselves to be. But beyond those expectations, there is a peace. A strength that can only be accessed by deterioration. That yes, we must go to hell. But we must not forget to come back.

I begin walking East on 23rd towards the train, finally ready to call it a night. As the subway roars through the tunnel in a clamor of screeching metal, I think to myself that maybe it all had to happen. Maybe everything between then and now was more stepping stone than quicksand. Or maybe it was both. And somewhere above me, the fountain in Union Square quietly reflects the city. The Brooklyn Bridge stands watch over the East River, cradling the passing cars. In the synagogue around the corner, the Torah rests in the Ark, rolled into itself like a hug. I arrive to an empty apartment and crawl into bed. Tired, disheveled, sweaty, and a little more gone than I was yesterday. But as I pull the thin sheets over my shoulder, I send out a small prayer that at the end, all of this destruction will make way for something else.

Something holy.